The Mysterious Case of the Five on Vacation
by Taliatoennien
Summary: SUMMARY: An Irish abnormal race seeks Ashley's help to free a unicorn. Story events set in three different time periods: ten years before the start of "Sanctuary," one of the Five's summers from Oxford, and three days after "Pavor Nocturnis."


SUMMARY: An Irish abnormal race seeks Ashley's help to free a unicorn. Story events set in three different time periods: ten years before the start of "Sanctuary," one of the Five's summers from Oxford, and three days after "Pavor Nocturnis; spoilers through that point.

DISCLAIMER: "Sanctuary" isn't mine; I am simply having a good time being a fangirl and not-too-patiently waiting for season 3. I'm not making any money from this.

GENERAL INFORMATION: Ficathon challenge story for Lavenderseaslug. Specifically, addressing the two prompts, "The Five go on vacation" and "Helen is forced to take a break." Lavenderseaslug also asked for Helen/Will, Helen/John, and Helen/Nikola (in the words of another LJ fan: goodness, the Five did love each other, didn't they?). Although I'm not a conventional romance writer, I've included as many deep moments between all three pairs as I could based on the way that I see their relationships.

RATING: If you're old enough to watch "Sanctuary," you're old enough to read this story.

WARNING: It's me. That makes the angst warning redundant. No other warnings necessary.

THANKS: To Annienau08 for another fantastic beta – and for being a fantastic friend. To Rowan_D for writing the main story prompt one night on the Robin Hood forum by mistake. To Keilantrasquill for the Irish names and the perfect race concept. And to Abbey, for coming up with the ficathon and thus getting me off my butt in the first place!

The Mysterious Case of the Five on Vacation

by Alicia

"_A happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."_

"_Once, when I was searching, somewhere out of reach, far away, in a place I could not find, or heart obey. Now that I'm a woman, everything is strange."_

"_Well I wish I didn't care! I wish to God I didn't care about anything but my magic! But I do!"_

-The Last Unicorn

"Mom! Henry says we have a unicorn! And he says I can ride her!"

It _had_ been a "whatever-passes-for-normal" day at the Sanctuary. The Big Guy had been in the basement doing everyone's laundry. James, in town for a week to supervise some particularly slow-witted (but not dangerous) abnormals integrating themselves into the immigrant population in the United States, had been delivering Shakespeare monologues to the mermaid. Helen had been reading some of the massive stack of files that James had brought with him in her office.

Come to think of it, Ashley was planning to get in trouble. That still made it a normal day at the Sanctuary.

"I don't know what Henry told you, but you can't ride her," Helen said, setting the files aside and giving Ashley her full attention. "She doesn't have shoes, so she'd hurt herself outside even if you could take a unicorn into Old City, and she doesn't have room to carry a rider inside."

"What if I hunched down really low, and rode her down the South tunnel, the one with the dirt floor? Please, Mom?"

"Darling, she's a unicorn. No one has ever ridden her before."

"Duh."

Oh, dear. Helen sighed. Whether she said the words or not, Ashley was going to hate what she had to say next. "It's too dangerous." Ashley's three least favorite words in the universe.

"Mom!"

"I mean it. No one is going to ride her for the first time, without a saddle, in an area so small that if anything were to go wrong she could crush you against a wall or ceiling without even intending to hurt you, let alone if she did decide she didn't want you on her back. It would be like riding a bull blindfolded."

Ashley pouted.

Preteen eye-rolling, Helen could handle…better than most mothers, actually, since immature Ashley was immature John in miniature. But there was real pain behind Ashley's eyes too.

"Fine. I'll teach Henry how to climb the scaffolding in the empty habitat, then." She whipped her blonde pigtails and scampered out of the room.

Helen sighed. As she did every time Ashley went off half-cocked, she considered chasing her daughter and physically restraining her somewhere quiet and safe. But Ashley would just escape and find something more dangerous to do. This time at least she couldn't kill or permanently injure herself falling from the scaffolding. "Twelve years," Helen said to the empty room. She inspected a lock of her own hair. Even though she knew exactly what color it was and that it wouldn't turn grey, it looked grey in the moment. She amused herself pretending to count grey hairs. Then she went back to work.

Two hours, seven previously-perfectly good scaffolding beams, and one blood-curdling scream from Henry later, Ashley sat in the infirmary with a pouty expression that had not changed. "Please don't say 'I told you so.'"

"Why would I do that?" Helen said, hiding a smirk and wrapping another layer of gauze firmly around Ashley's knee. The smirk was for show; she was truthfully worried about her daughter. The stones buried deep in Ashley's knee had come out easily enough, but Ashley had not cried.

"Because you told me not to climb the scaffolding and I didn't listen."

"I don't recall saying not to climb the scaffolding. Please hold still, I'm almost done."

Ashley mumbled something.

"I didn't hear you."

"I said," Ashley said, scowling and enunciating clearly, "will you please come tuck me in tonight?" She looked away, as if to snatch the words from the air with her eyes alone and force them back inside.

"I would be glad to. Would you like a story?"

Ashley didn't respond, but her eyes said yes, please. And Helen had always been very good at reading Ashley's eyes.

Ashley pouted all the way to her room until she reached its anonymity, then she let the expression drop. She curled into the thick blankets and waited for her mother to arrive. It didn't take long.

"Once upon a time," Helen said by way of introduction.

"Mom," said Ashley.

"Once upon a time, when your mother was younger yet just as beautiful as she is today," said Ashley's British Uncle James, who had somehow slipped in without Ashley noticing.

"James," Ashley's mother said.

The familiarity and fondness was a lullaby all its own, but Ashley figured she'd better interrupt them or they wouldn't tell her anything at all. "Still here, guys," she said. "And Mom promised me a real story."

"One summer upon a time while we were still in school, we saw our first unicorns," James said.

"More than one?" said Ashley.

"More than one," James said.

"Well, we never actually saw more than one," her mom added, brushing Ashley's hair back from her forehead tenderly and abstractly. "But we heard the whole herd."

"A unicorn like the one downstairs?"

"Yes, exactly like the one downstairs. In fact, it might have been the same unicorn."

"How?" Ashley asked, and she was not ashamed of her own wide-eyed expression, not in the privacy of her room with the two people who knew her best in the world.

"Unicorns live a very long time," said James. "Their caretakers, on the other hand, live a very short time."

"We were in Ireland," Ashley's mom said. "It was the first time I had ever left England. My father arranged the trip. He said that I was too serious. He wanted me to have fun. To _safely_ have fun," she added, stopping stroking Ashley's hair for a second and frowning. "He wanted me to go drink in Irish pubs."

"He did not say that," James said. "He said that you needed cultural exposure."

"How little you remember."

"It was just the two of you?" Ashley said.

"We had some … other school friends along too," Ashley's mom said slowly. "Let me tell you about Ireland. There are huge fields of clover, wild and green."

She might have said more, but Ashley didn't hear it. Her mother's words painted a wonderful foreign landscape, and Ashley could sense it beckoning to her within the world of dreams. Her family was here, she was safe, and so she surrendered to the dream, and willingly lost the story. It would be there another night.

It was dark. That part, Ashley could handle. She wasn't like the other Sanctuary children who came and went, who camped in their parents' rooms during thunderstorms. The only time she told her mom she was afraid was when something particularly freaky entered their home.

Which, Ashley noted, was right now. Something particularly freaky was in her bedroom. And it was too dark. Even when the power went out, there were still flashlights and candles in the halls and moonbeams from outside. There was darkness behind her eyes and in front of them, and there was something on her bed itself. Ashley opened her mouth to scream…

And found it covered by a small warm hand. Something in the room shifted, so it was no longer black even though there was still no natural or unnatural visible source of light. Ashley found herself staring into the most beautiful brown eyes she had ever seen. The man was ordinary height, light and strong, elfin. He spoke with an Irish lilt. "Sorry to scare ye, but we need your help."

Ashley took his hand off her mouth, but did not let it go. He was strong; she might be stronger. "We?"

A man came through Ashley's door, illuminated by the unnatural light. He pointed at Ashley's bedside lamp, as if expecting it to come on at his command alone. The lamp remained exactly as it was. The man said a word Ashley was sure she wasn't allowed to repeat. That meant she should tell Henry. "What are you doing in my room," Ashley said, springing to her feet and pushing the first man aside. She took the knife from her bedside drawer in one fluid motion – a present from her mother after Ashley had proven she could defend herself effectively against an ambitious wyvern with it – and held it between her and the two men. For good measure, she used the word the second man had used.

The first man raised an eyebrow. "We'll have none of that," he said. "We're friends."

"Then let's go talk to my mother." Ashley didn't put the knife down. "She can tell me you're friends."

"Too many words, not enough time, we have to go," the second man said.

"I am Keegan," said the man by Ashley's bedside. "I am one of the people you would call the Fir Bolg."

"You were in my mom's story." How Ashley remembered that, she didn't know. But he had been there, somewhere.

"Perhaps she called me with her story," he said. He inched closer, almost close enough to grab the hand Ashley was not using to hold the knife. "We have to go _now_."

"Why?" Ashley still didn't budge.

"We really don't have time for this," said the main in the doorway. "Take the brat or leave her. Let's find the unicorn and get out of here."

"I know where she is," Ashley said warily. "But first we tell my mom."

"She knows little of our people," said Keegan, "and she does not know the unicorns. She knows that the clover that changes with our footsteps leads the unicorns, but she does not know where it takes them."

"That's very pretty. I'm going to find my mom now."

The second man crossed the room, took Ashley's knife from her hand and threw it on the bed easily, then took her arm in an iron grip. "If you want the unicorn to stay alive, little girl, you will help us get it out of this city tonight. No questions. No stopping. We go."

"Fine. But I'm going to be the one to take her anywhere. If you're lying, I turn her right around."

"You are the only one of us who can hope to ride her," Keegan said softly. "Will you lead us? It will be dark again."

"Dude, how do you do that?" Ashley asked, as the world went to black.

"Magic," Keegan said, mischief clearly evident in his tone.

"He's a telekinetic," said a bored voice. "He can manipulate light waves."

"Dude!" She sputtered for a little in the renewed darkness, making her way to the lower levels by touch. In that moment, twelve year old Ashley Magnus knew she was in love.

"Oh, that impresses you? I can manipulate electricity just as easily," and there was a crackle from behind them.

"I think your mother will need new light bulbs in her pantry."

"She has to replace them every couple of weeks anyway."

It was relatively easy for Ashley to lead the two strangers through the Sanctuary, and she could have found the unicorn by touch alone, even without Keegan's light. Actually acting as a team, her two strange companions had pushed her forward, toward the mystical creature, who had welcomed Ashley as a long-lost sister.

For her whole life, Ashley would never forget the experience of riding a unicorn. Of seeing the creature in Keegan's not-light glow, pure and white, majestic enough to make all the half-chosen silly names Ashley had come up with flee from her head. Of approaching her while both men kept their distance, of the way the unicorn's nose first felt in Ashley's hand. Of the feel of her coat. Of the way her horn flashed in the moonlight as she ran, and how her gait was so much … more … than any horse's in the world.

It was over far too quickly. Ashley slid off the unicorn's back in a little forest glade. For a long while, she watched mesmerized as the clover changed color, shifting through the spectrum from purple to green and back again. Then she watched the unicorn, standing in the newly-visible moonlight, strong and still, drinking in something Ashley could not comprehend. The sun would rise soon. Would she see it?

A very breathless Keegan finally came into view, trailed by his companion. "Thank you," he said. "She'll be safe now. I can keep her hidden."

"Where are you taking her?"

"Ireland. The unicorns aren't extinct there."

"Why didn't you just ask my mother to send her to the Irish Sanctuary? We don't keep prisoners. She would have been free to go from there."

Keegan brushed Ashley's arm lightly. "There was no time. She had to be out near the clover before the moon was fully up."

"I'm going to marry you when I'm old enough," Ashley said. Five minutes later she would regret the line; an hour later she would pretend she'd never said it.

"I'll be gone, by the time you're old enough," Keegan said, with just a hint of sadness overlaying the mischief in his voice. "I will soon be seven years old."

"Liar."

"For you, that is still to be a child. For me, that is old enough to be an elder. I shall never forget you, Ashley Magnus." He touched her hand again, then turned as if to lead the unicorn away.

Ashley snapped a picture of them with her cell phone, capturing one more of the rare moments when Keegan faced them, before he and the unicorn both blurred and vanished.

"And I now have the thankless task of putting you in a cab back home," the taller man said. He pointed randomly into the trees. There were flashes like fireflies. He looked as if he expected Ashley to be impressed.

Ashley wasn't. "I don't like you."

"I don't like you either." 

"Then why are you helping me?"

"You remind me of someone."

That was all Ashley was ever going to get out of him. Him, she would see again someday, though, she decided, as Old City came back into view, and the dream vanished into the everyday morning reality.

From the time she'd found her daughter's room empty – which was barely an hour after the time the security cameras showed her departure with two shadowy figures – to the time when the cab had dropped Ashley at the door at six thirty at the morning, the Sanctuary had been dark. Not even candles had worked. Helen had nearly climbed every wall in the Sanctuary, and scoured every place she could reach for a working phone. Then again her daughter was in her arms, safe and whole, with a new maturity in her eyes.

Helen grounded Ashley from anything remotely dangerous for a month, forbid her to ever climb the scaffolding with Henry again (or to read comics with Henry, or to make up words with Henry, or to do anything with Henry that wasn't Henry's idea), and confined her to her room at least until the tree branch scrapes healed. Then Helen went back to wandering the Sanctuary, slowly this time. She made sure that Ashley knew all of what she had felt – that as furious as she'd been after being scared out of her mind – she was proud of Ashley too.

Helen Magnus realized something about her daughter that day. Ashley was willful, proud, independent. She had her father's strength and both her parents' fervent need to push boundaries. The life that Helen had half-created, half-found, was tailor-made for Ashley.

She would not stand in Ashley's way. But she prayed every night that their chosen life would not ever require her daughter's death.

There had been a time when Helen had been young enough to experience the same kind of wonder. As Ashley's scrapes healed and her stir-craziness grew, Helen found the time to finish the story, of the unicorns and the Fir Bolg, and the shining moments of friendship that were all the more precious for their brevity.

Ireland was so green. Why should that come as a surprise, Helen mused. She'd studied all the flora patterns. She knew the seasonal patterns, which were not so different from those in England. But there was still something about Ireland itself that was more than the sum of its parts. Rather odd, both the limitations and the unnatural strengths of human perception.

"Helen?"

"Hmmm?"

"Which one of us is right?"

Helen, who had been at the front of the group as they'd half-marched half-trudged the cobblestone road, looked over her shoulder from John to Nikola. Both wore identical smug expressions.

"You're both wrong," said Nigel from the back. "Faeries don't exist."

"Don't rule it out," Helen said automatically. That phrase came as naturally as breathing did to her these days. She didn't have an obvious ability the way John and Nigel did, and she certainly wasn't a vampire, but there was still so much they were learning, about themselves, about each other, about ordinary human powers mixed with those of the ancient vampires.

"Abnormals exist. Little flying people who stand three inches tall …" Nigel trailed off, probably remembering the illustrations they'd all been poring over just the other night.

The world was so terribly confusing sometimes.

"I believe the clover is changing color," James said from the other side of Nigel. "It was purple a second ago."

"It was not," Nikola said. "It was blue."

John pushed James and Nikola aside, and knelt by the small clover patch. "Green," he said, picking one and holding it up for the others to examine.

"It was purple earlier, though," Helen said. Truthfully, she had been too lost first in her own thoughts, then in refereeing her erstwhile companions, to pay a whole lot of attention, and James would chastise her for that later.

"Young Helen is quite correct."

"Stop calling her 'young Helen,'" John said to James, putting a protective hand on Helen's shoulder. That earned him a glare from Nikola, which he ignored.

Helen absently laced her fingers through John's, pulling them both down to the clover patch. "It's definitely green," she said. "And James calls everyone 'young,' because we have no hope of catching his thoughts."

"Clearly that is not true," James murmured, kneeling on the other side of Helen and John to also examine the clover. "I have not been able to deduce why the clover appears differently to us now."

"We were supposed to be at the inn an hour ago," Nikola said, fidgeting under his packs.

"You're just bored," said Nigel.

"_You_ aren't carry the heaviest packs in the group."

"It's your own fault you insisted on putting four bottles of wine into yours."

With a tolerant look behind at the bickering students, James turned back to Helen and John and said, "I believe the clover is unlikely to change with us here. Perhaps we should walk a little ways down the path and see what happens."

"I could surprise it," John said. "Teleport back when it thinks we're gone."

"It's clover," Nikola said from over John's head.

Nigel said, "I'm hungry."

Helen stood, again pulling John up with her. "Gentlemen, please. I know we have been traveling for a long while now, but you didn't really think this was a vacation."

"This is better," John said, head still turned toward the clover.

"Let us push the boundaries of science _after_ we put the wine down."

"You just want to drink it," Nigel said. "And you're the only one of us who can't get drunk anymore.

Sometimes Helen wondered how they'd ever managed to work well enough together to fix the wheel on her father's carriage, let alone to make serum out of lost vampire blood.

"The clover, it changes when there are unicorns around," the innkeeper said, round-eyed, with many dramatic pauses. Helen didn't need James' powers of observation to see the other patrons rolling their eyes. "The purple, it guides the unicorns home, see, and the green, it shows them when to hide."

"The clover was blue," Nikola muttered.

"The bright blue, see," the innkeeper said without missing a beat, "it tells the Unicorns when the Fir Bolg are around."

"The Fir Bolg?" Helen said politely, ignoring the snickers from all around her and the rumble of Nigel's stomach.

"The Fir Bolg are the children of the old gods. The histories say that they make things happen." His voice faded to a whisper. "If your eggs are gone, or your cow was milked, or wood appears in your stove, that's the doing of the Fir Bolg."

"The faeries," Nikola said dryly. "You've never seen one, of course."

"Well, me boy…" and the innkeeper had his excuse to pull a frighteningly tall tale out of his hat, which Helen proceeded to ignore. Instead, she caught John's eye, and gave him the one wordless signal that all five of them understood. Abnormal.

Three stories and some rather obnoxious noises later, the Five persuaded the innkeeper to save the rest of his stories for later so they could eat, and sat in relative seclusion in the midst of the rapidly-filling common room. It was strange how different the world had looked to Helen since the experiment. Since she had changed. Sometimes it seemed the same as it always had been; perhaps a bit brighter, a bit smaller and more easily accessible, but essentially the same. Sometimes it seemed populated with utterly fantastical creatures and phenomena. Helen could not hold both in her mind at once. Thus, it was James who spotted the actual Fir Bolg.

It was Nikola who signaled Helen, though. "Faerie," he said, as nonchalantly if he was saying 'tea.'

"I know," Helen said. And she really did know. The smaller woman was obviously not human. Pale and graceful, she met Helen's eyes for just a second, but in that second they became friends. Then the moment was lost in the jostle of the everyday Irish common room in the everyday Irish inn.

They had taken three rooms. John had offered, in jest, to share with Helen, when Helen's father had first suggested the trip. He had not said it in front of Helen's father. Helen had given John a Look and a warning about propriety, and since they had been alone, well… But John had been behaving as a perfect gentleman so far during the trip. The flowers on the bedside table of Helen's room bore John Druitt's touch.

John, James, Nikola, and Helen were all milled about Helen's room, half talking about what they wanted to see in Ireland and half talking about returning to the changing clover patch and tracking the Fir Bolg. One by one, Helen noticed in the middle of a conversation, the daisies John had placed by her bedside changed into small yellow wildflowers.

"Very funny, Nigel," Nikola said.

The flowers continued silently to change.

Nikola sent a blast of electricity supposedly in the direction of the changing flowers. It went instead out the back window.

There was a grunt from the flower vase in Nigel's voice. "How did you know it was me?"

"You still have your spectacles on, old chap," John said.

"Whoops," Nigel said as he flashed into view.

John covered Helen's eyes.

James threw a blanket at Nigel.

Nigel wrapped it around himself like a toga.

Nikola made Nigel's spectacles float off his face into the air.

John kept his hand firmly over Helen's eyes.

"Gentlemen!" Helen said. Yelled, rather; one of the few occasions she had to raise her voice. "Look out the window."

The thing that had originally caught the corner of Helen's eye around John's hand was the dramatic color shift out the east window. There was sound and motion. Helen pushed herself off the bed and ran over. Her faerie friend was standing near the inn, looking up. Their eyes met again for a second, then the Fir Bolg beckoned with her hand.

"Teleport us down, John," Helen said.

"I can take you and me."

"All of us," James said.

"You're not taking Naked Nigel here," said Nikola.

"You, me, and James," Helen said. "Quickly, please, before we lose our chance."

They saw one unicorn. She veered to the side, almost close enough for Helen to touch. They were surrounded by sound and motion, and beauty.

The Fir Bolg woman smiled enigmatically, and moved to follow the unicorns into the forest.

"Please, tell me your name," Helen said on impulse, stepping in front of John and James.

"It doesn't matter. You and I, we shall not meet again," said the elfin woman.

Helen was surprised at the loss that went through her at the truth of that. "Why?"

"My journey encompasses the length of a mountain stream, and yours the oceans that circle the earth." She moved farther away, as the sounds of unicorn hooves receded.

Helen reached out both her hands. "I am Helen, don't forget me."

"Eilish." She said it with an odd lilt to her voice, different from an ordinary Irish accent. And then they were gone, and it was time for John to take James and Helen back into the world of the everyday. Back into the world that was already becoming strange to Helen.

It was many years … more than a century … and Helen never forgot the elfin woman, nor the two brief contacts she'd had with unicorns, nor the way the Irish landscape once looked newborn. Telling the story to Ashley briefly rekindled Helen's wonder at the brevity of life, at a race who only expected to live ten years, yet lived those years within a world of wonder and magic. Ashley mostly forgot her childhood crush and continued to grow. And then Ashley was finally, devastatingly gone. Helen envied the Fir Bolg their ever-present reason to cherish the time they had, and looked for a way to adapt her own gifts so she could also cherish only the time she had with the people she loved. It all went horribly wrong.

It was three nights after the Mayan tombs before Helen slept. She had been sitting awake at her computer, refreshing emails from the European Sanctuaries and distracting herself with supply orders. She must have fallen asleep at the computer. She'd dreamed of Ashley, but not as she'd feared, not of Ashley as one of those horrid mutated creatures that were no longer human. She'd dreamed of Ashley at twelve, golden pigtails and mischievous grin. They had been flying kites in the main room of the Sanctuary under the vaulted ceiling, just to see if it was possible to run quickly enough to produce enough wind to make paper fly.

She took her head from the keyboard. She sat and shook.

It had not been as she had feared, and yet it still hurt with a bone-deep ache. The good memories were sometimes even worse than the bad. All Helen's life had been spent looking for the future and for the fantastic. Pushing the boundaries, changing the world, discovering unicorns. But since … that day … all she had wanted was to live again in a world where Ashley was again at her side.

The computer screen came into focus. The clock said four fifty five A.M. There was a new email from an unknown address in Ireland. Helen frowned and let the mouse hover over the 'delete' button for a second, but then reminded herself that she was logged into her secure email where unknown senders were filtered through the Sanctuaries closest to them. So she clicked on the message. It was from the Fir Bolg clan. It was a brief, formal birth announcement. The first baby unicorn in over a century had just been born. The signature was "Ashley, daughter of Keegan."

The words swam, focused, and swam again. North Tower, Helen thought. She needed to go upstairs and outside, she needed to breathe.

The wind of the Tower did help. Soon, Helen stood watching Ashley dart along the battlements of the North Tower. She was twelve years old, and she was riding the just-born baby unicorn with its tiny horn. "Nos must amitto vivo in," Helen whispered in benediction. Ashley waved goodbye, as she mounted the slowly-lighting clouds on the back of the unicorn. The sky darkened, and the Old City changed to a blasted landscape, ash blowing in the stark day. A figure came through the door behind Helen. She whirled, drawing the gun from her hip as she followed the figure with her eyes. She tried to make out whether it was human or mutant. She would not shoot unless she had to.

"I was wondering when you'd come up here," Will said.

Helen would not make the same mistake she'd made with Jessica and force him to go through a painful and dangerous transformation. "Were you bitten?" she said, keeping the gun steady and backing away a pace.

Will put his hands up. "Whoa," he said.

Will. The present. Real dawn. No ghost-child flirting with the stone edges, no blasted landscape, just a crisp cold morning and two people who should not be up yet. Helen put the gun back in its holster in one smooth motion, praying that her hands had not been shaking. "I'm sorry, Will," she said.

Will dropped his hands. "Okay, now you better tell me what's going on," he said. "Who did you think I was?"

"It's nothing important."

He spun backward toward the door he'd come through. "We don't have a crazy abnormal loose?"

"No."

"Something followed you back from the Mayan Tombs?"

"Not … exactly." Damn Will for insisting so long ago that Helen not lie to him. She couldn't do it at all, not without a twinge of conscience that turned her features into a better lie detector for Will than an empath in the building would have been.

"Define 'exactly.'" Will calmly walked up next to her as if she hadn't been holding a gun on him a few minutes before.

"I was on the trip when I saw it. But what I saw was here." _Please let him not ask me any more questions please let him not ask me any more questions please let him not ask me any more questions._

"What happened?"

"Would it do any good at all to say I don't want to talk about it?"

Will flashed one of those cheeky grins he was so famous for. "You gave me a hard time figuring out what had happened, that's for sure. I thought you were just pissed off at the expensive 'vacation.' Y'know, not finding what you were looking for?" He shrugged. "But you sleep when you're pissed off. Since you've been spending nights at your desk, well…"

"Please tell me you weren't staying up all night waiting to find out when I went to sleep."

"Helen, you did need me to come find you. Look where you're standing."

She had unconsciously leaned against Will, the side of her head pressing against his jacket, one of his arms around her shoulder. She tried to pull away with the lame even to her eyes excuse, "I was cold…"

Will held on. His face took on a familiar _you stay right where you are_ look. He was a lot stronger than she'd remembered.

He was warm and real, and there were no damned pale-faces – literally, there was no damned race – and the sun was actually coming up. She needed to be strong, she needed to get over this, she needed to accept that there was a reason for her life to be so long and to overcome the ghosts on her own. But she was shaking, despite every effort she made to lock her feelings inside, since these were more than feelings, they were ghosts and mirages and images and perceptions, and she wanted to stay there, in Will's arms, just one moment longer. Because he was alive. He hadn't gone through that horrible transformation, he hadn't lost his faith. He was still slightly naïve, slightly jaded, slightly optimistic, still had his sense of humor. And the ghosts were so much more real than the real world.

Will was alive. The beautiful world that she saw and loved still turned, as the rising sun attested. Will's arm around her shoulders warmed something that had been shivering for a very long time.

"What happened?"

"I fell asleep at my desk, obviously," she said wryly. "I woke up, couldn't sleep anymore, and came up to the North Tower." She gave him a sideways look and a smirk. "You, apparently, were keeping vigil somewhere outside my office, found me and followed me."

"More or less accurate. I meant, what happened to you while you were gone?"

Helen sighed. "Once again, would it do any good to tell you I don't want to talk about it?"

Will's voice was surprisingly gentle. "The longer you put off feeling it, the more it's going to hurt, Helen."

How did he even know that she was hurting?

It was Will. Never mind.

"I got an email this morning," Helen said, as brightly as she could make herself sound. It rang horribly false, and she was still shaking. "You remember the Fir Bolg, from the files?"

"Irish race? Only lives about ten years? Capable of knocking the power out through the entire Sanctuary?"

Helen quirked an eyebrow. "That would be them. Ashley made friends with one of them, a long time ago." She put just enough emphasis on the word "friend."

"Big brown eyes?" Off Helen's look, Will added, "There was a picture of a guy plastered on the front of her Facebook page. Fairly obvious how smitten Ashley was."

"Yes, essentially correct. And yes, smitten is the word I would use as well. She was twelve. He was cute. His name was Keegan. He's gone now, but he had a daughter." Helen closed her eyes, drew a breath, and tried to say the rest of what she had to say without either shaking or crying. "Ashley. Daughter of Keegan. She wrote to me this morning."

"Magnus," Will said.

She was far too vulnerable. Far, far too vulnerable. And yet somehow this was just another hopeless battle that Helen Magnus and Will Zimmerman could win together.

And so she let him hold her awhile longer. And if there were tears, well, no one would tell.

After all, it was pre-dawn and no one was supposed to be up yet.

~FIN


End file.
